Ontario civil servants attempt to access websites containing pornography and other illicit — or even illegal — content tens of thousands of times a month, the Star can reveal.

Ontario civil servants attempt to access websites containing pornography and other illicit — or even illegal — content tens of thousands of times a month, the Star can reveal.

Confidential reports on how the province’s more than 60,000 public employees use their computers have been viewed by the Star despite strenuous efforts by Queen’s Park to prevent their release.

They show:

•Tens of thousands of hits to sites with content described as “illegal or questionable,” “drugs,” “racism and hate,” “militancy and extremist.”

•More than 40,000 attempts each month by civil servants to circumvent the province’s computer security system

•As many as 145 million hits a month on websites focused on sports, entertainment, travel, shopping, games and real estate.

•Up to 15 million monthly visits to streaming video sites including nhl.com, tsn.ca, ctv.ca, msn.com, Google Videos, entertainment site ebaumsworld.com and other large Internet services that carry television and video content.

Each month dozens of investigations are carried out into computer-related fraud, extortion, disclosure of confidential government information and “operating a business.”

There are legitimate business reasons for ensuring the civil service has liberal access to the Internet for both professional and personal productivity, says Ron McKerlie, deputy minister of Ministry of Government Services which is responsible for monitoring civil servants’ Internet use.

Those who abuse the privilege are monitored and caught, he said.

“We would have just under 100 (people) a year who we’re pretty sure are doing bad stuff and we would do a full-scale investigation on those individuals,” said McKerlie. “Discipline really depends on where they went, what they did and how many times they did it.”

Punishment has ranged from a suspension and a docking of pay to a couple of former civil servants who were fired and referred to police for investigation, he said.

“This is serious stuff. This is illegal stuff,” he said. “In my two and a half years on the job, there have been three cases where it’s been really ugly stuff where the police have been involved and very serious charges laid.”

Along with social networking sites including Facebook and YouTube, websites with illicit content are blocked from access on the government’s computer network.

But in one month alone last year, government staff attempted to visit “proxy avoidance” services — sites that provide users a way to slip past corporate firewalls — nearly 50,000 times.

It’s unclear from the reports how many of those attempts were successful or how many other attempts were not detected at all by government computers.

Among the blocked attempts were more than 80,000 visits to “illegal or questionable” sites, more than 7,500 to sites listed under the category “drugs,” more than 3,500 to “racism and hate” and more than 500 to “militancy and extremist” sites.

The destination for about 20 per cent of all blocked sites is consistently pornographic or “adult” content.

In 2007, provincial police charged a then 48-year-old systems analyst in the Government Services ministry with possession of child pornography after finding images of child sexual abuse and exploitation on a computer at the ministry’s Toronto office.

In May, an employee of the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services was charged with accessing child pornography and possessing child pornography after he found a way around the province’s firewalls.

“What strikes me as quite egregious is the explicit use of proxy servers,” said Greg Elmer, media studies professor and director of the Infoscape Research Lab at Ryerson University.

“Some of this may be for security reasons but given the sites accessed, there is quite clearly an ongoing issue with access to so-called adult content during work hours on public service computers.”

McKerlie said those who attempt to do an end run on the province’s computer security system will eventually get caught.

“If somebody wants to do a bad thing and decides they want to go around our security, those ones we’re all over . . . We believe we will find them.”

The Star originally sought the monthly IT reports under freedom of information legislation in March. The Ministry of Government Services denied their release.

While that decision remains under appeal, the Star this week viewed copies of several months of the reports from 2008 and 2009.

The level of computer misuse documented appears consistent over a year-long period. The reports contain no names of individuals.

“This stuff should be public,” said Kevin Gaudet, federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

“There’s an obvious and reasonable expectation that if you’re an employee of the government you shouldn’t be using its resources for abuse or for your own profit running a business.”

In one month alone last year, civil servants visited sports websites nearly 15 million times. Entertainment sites accounted for another 15 million visits.

A category called “Society and Lifestyles: Social Networking and Personal Sites” logged another 9 million visits. And shopping and real estate sites got clicked 7 million times.

Chat technology, such as Yahoo and MSN, is also available to staff who engage in online conversations thousands of times a month.

Bandwidth-sucking video and audio can represent a cost to the government, McKerlie said.

“If we have to increase the size of the network to accommodate that . . . it could be a cost,” he said.

While social networking sites like Facebook are blocked, others, such as MySpace is curiously not part of that ban. And the reports show a pattern of nearly 200,000 visits to that social networking site each month.

McKerlie said the Internet’s prevalence in modern society makes it impossible to block all social networking sites and streaming video since many of those sites do have applicability to business use.

“We have people whose job it is to work in that medium and monitor that medium,” he said. “This is such a part of the way everybody works today. It’s tough to draw a perfect line in the sand and say, ‘These sites and tools should be in and these sites and tools should be out.’ We’ve done it to the extent that we can.”

Studies have shown some level of Internet browsing at work is actually good for productivity because it allows employees to integrate their lives and their work, says Walid Hejazi, a business productivity expert at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

“Some browsing is healthy. But (the provincial reports) may indicate that this is well beyond the optimum level. It seems high to me . . . It’s up to the government to justify that level of activity.”

And there are plenty of other freely accessible sites that lure heavy traffic from provincial government offices.

Beyond its impact on productivity, heavy Internet use by civil servants also increases security concerns, said Hejazi.

“People are going after information they can sell and governments host that kind of information.”

A national computer security study by Rotman and TELUS released two weeks ago found Canadian organizations suffered a 29 per cent increase in security breaches between 2009 and 2010, with governments hit far harder that companies.

Government departments across the country experienced a nearly 74 per cent increase in security breaches in one year, in part attributed to more vigilant oversight.

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